


Treasure

by Jackie Thomas (Jackie_Thomas)



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2013-07-15
Packaged: 2017-12-20 07:11:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/884425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackie_Thomas/pseuds/Jackie%20Thomas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six months after VE Day Jim is summoned back to the Circus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Treasure

Six months after VE Day Jim is summoned back to the Circus. He spends half an hour with the Chief. A dry sherry, a distracted handshake and a job offer in a room where, since a raid in forty-three, the windows don’t quite fit. 

The Dolphin has a dozen forms in a buff coloured folder for him to fill in and a hundred signatures to collect. “Press down hard for the carbon please, Mr Prideaux,” she urges. 

Connie explains the new terms of engagement, speaking of the Commissars as if they are her own disobedient children. The war hasn’t ended he learns, it is just beginning.

Control gives him his assignment, a treasure hunt on the Hungarian border. Smiley placidly looks on. He says how pleased he is to see Jim looking so well.

He finds Bill in the mess room with a pile of files and an empty teacup. He isn’t reading; his spectacles dangle from an idle hand and his gaze locks on distant coordinates. The war has polished away the last of the youth he once was but he still dresses like an undergraduate; simultaneously tweedy and bohemian, fingers stained with oil paints and tobacco.

When at last he notices Jim he roars his name and tips up the table getting to his feet. 

“Hullo,” Jim says as Bill walks into his arms.

They get a half bottle of Black & White’s and go to Bill’s Pimlico flat; a basement in a street that has lost most of its even numbers but has kept its odd ones. Upstairs a linguist named Riley, who Bill intends to recruit, plays scratchy Josephine Baker on his gramophone until the power goes out. 

Bill, or Lawrence of Arabia as the janitors have taken to calling him, had a magnificent war. He is the stuff of legend. Jim tagged along for a while, playing stringer on some of his assignments but he works better alone. When Bill looked east Jim took on the Fascists in central Europe. He joined the partisans and learnt to break necks. 

The corpses rise up in his dreams nightly but still Bill asks him: “Teaching? In the country? What were you thinking?” 

He looks at his hands by the light of a flickering stub of candle. If Bill doesn’t know, how can he explain?

Bill, silent in his suede shoes, is suddenly behind Jim’s chair. He rests his hand on his neck, his thumb circling the tender spot at the nape. 

“You don’t have to come back,” he says. “And you don’t have to explain.”

Jim glances up to check Bill means it. 

“The game’s changing,” he says. “Now’s the time to get involved or say to hell with it. There wouldn’t be any shame in standing down after everything you’ve done.”

A flash of anger, as only Bill can provoke. Bill brought him in and now, with a world war behind them, is he feeling guilty? Or suddenly protective? Who does he think he is? If your country calls, you answer.

He would have told him that too, but Bill has leaned down to kiss his mouth and he doesn’t care to argue anymore.

*~*

Later they lie together in Bill’s bed; the palm of his hand across Jim’s chest, tracking the free-fall of his heartbeat. He pushes his head into the curve of Jim’s neck; surrenders to Jim’s slow hand, his life’s work of keeping his errant hair in check.

“What about you?” Jim asks. “Are you staying in the Game?” 

Bill ignores the question. His roaming hand has found a scar on Jim’s hip. He traces its shape with his thumb, a ragged circle, a lost island. “This is new,” he says. “Where did you get it?”

Jim has often been surprised by Bill’s tenderness, even as a fumbling teenager or in the narrow undulating bunk of a troop ship, but human touch has never been his priority, or even sex. The first objective with Bill has always been possession. He has an artist’s unflinching eye and the stone heart of an inquisitor. He isn’t satisfied until he has the whole story, no matter how many fingernails he has to extract to get it. 

So Jim tells him of Prague and Lidice and Lezaky. For all that the scar aches with remembered pain there is relief in telling the story. When Bill has answers to all his questions he gives a sigh, a muffled moan.

“Let’s run away together,” Bill says. “Be my only love. Let’s tell every bastard one of them to go to hell.”

Jim laughs, possibly even blushes. “Don’t be an ass.”

“No?” Bill feigns dismay. “Really?”

He finally rests the palm of his hand on the scar and falls silent, unmoving under Jim’s arm. But he is not at peace. His stillness disguises taut muscle and a spine made of mooring cable. 

Upstairs Riley, potential Ace of Spies, plays the piano. An unfolding, complex tune Jim doesn’t quite recognise. He holds tight to Bill, he has to.

They are only disturbed when the bedside lamp goes on, apparently by a ghostly hand. Actually by the return of the electricity.

Bill curses and unpeels himself from their embrace. “Have you got cigarettes?”

Jim reaches for the packet on the bedside table and lights one for him. He watches him smoke. It is an old habit; a remnant from when he was eighteen and Bill Haydon cheerfully encompassed all of his vices.

Jim has often seen specks of gold in the plain brown of Bill’s eyes. As if a hoard of treasure is concealed beneath their surface. Now all he sees is granite. And Bill never used to mind being watched, he used to relish it, but he is obviously uncomfortable now.

“Stop it, Jimmy,” he says softly.

He gets out of bed, parking the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and heads for the bathroom. Jim hears him about the flat, hears him say, ‘fuck’.

There has always been something unreachable about Bill, a place inside him that cannot be prised open. This is an essential and unsurprising Service quality of course but it has taken on a different character tonight. There are signals being transmitted from that distant place; wild and frantic, in Morse or Semaphore. A message he cannot decipher except - except he knows Bill to be in terrible danger.

Bill comes back to bed with the remains of the Black & White, taking a swallow before passing the bottle to Jim. 

“So, are you?” Jim asks.

“Am I what?”

“Staying in the Game.”

“I’m balls deep in it already,” Bill says bitterly.

He softens instantly, a conscious self-correction, reaching for Jim, finding a place for him against his shoulder. So that Jim almost believes he has imagined everything. 

“When do you go?” Bill asks.

“Friday. Berlin Sleeper and then -.” 

Bill stops him with the gentlest of kisses. “You don’t have to always tell me the details,” he says. “You don’t always have to tell me.”

End

July 2013


End file.
